Jack Butcher - Visualising Value & Constant Creativity | Modern Wisdom Podcast 328

Jack Butcher is a designer, entrepreneur and the founder of Visualize Value. Jack has gone from being a normal agency designer to becoming the one-man-army behind Visualize Value - a business that generates over $100,000 a month at a 99% profit margin. Expect to learn how to avoid getting distracted by shiny object syndrome, how Jack prioritises creativity in a hectic business environment, what becoming a father teaches you about algorithms, how to sustain exponential growth and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Jack on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jackbutcher Check out Visualize Value - https://twitter.com/visualizevalue Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #visualizevalue #entrepreneurship #creativity - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I still don't really understand like the potential of the internet. You're always underestimating the power of what you're doing today. If you're being consistent and putting stuff out, you're always underestimating the fractal crazy effects that show up months and months or years later in some cases. And I think this is another idea that I've always struggled to articulate, but the just the notion that you did something for 12 months consistently, if nobody interacts with it, I would honestly challenge anybody on the planet, if you did something every day for 365 days, like some creative exercise and posted it, if you couldn't create one commercial opportunity off the back of that, I just don't think it's possible.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  The British are coming, the British are here.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I've arrived, we have arrived.

• 0:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we have. Was it harder to grow a business to 100 grand a month or to deal with a newborn baby?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Newborn baby, 10 times over, I think.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Incredible, man. Just like everything you take for granted, watching even people in the street with babies is like, everybody has babies, you know, how difficult can it be? It's fricking hard.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  It's hard.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  What's been the biggest challenge?

• 1:18Speaker 00

  I think

• 1:21Speaker 00

  just like handing over your agency or just like just completely absolving yourself of agency for a period of time where the baby is in control, right? The baby dictates how the day is going to go. This is not a, hey, this is the schedule for today. It's like you don't make those decisions anymore. Baby's making those decisions, at least for a couple of months, right? At the start, you're, you are on a different set of rules than you had ever imagined you would be on beforehand. Underestimated that to some degree, but we're, we're, we're at 14 weeks now. So we're sort of arriving at, actually, we're recording this, he broke a record last night, his longest sleep ever. So

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Nine hours and two minutes.

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  You're tracking your baby's sleep? Have you got an Oura ring on him?

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Right, he's got more equipment than you can possibly imagine.

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. So talk to me about lessons, right? You, this sort of one man band, running visualized value and all of the other stuff that you do. And then you add fatherhood into the mix. What is some of the lessons that you've learned from that?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  I think a lot of the business today has been based on this concept of using the internet to create leverage, like divorce your time and income, create products, not services. And those concepts all are incredibly, they're incredibly valuable to a business, but there is the connection between your time and the result is still very obvious when you take a step back from building those things. So big lessons, one was just how much uninterrupted focus can

• 3:13Speaker 00

  lead to these seemingly small things that create big results down the road. So you know, you could be walking around for four or five hours or sort of just like on the computer, messing around, reading something, and then an idea just comes to you. Those periods of time are drastically compressed after you're, you know, in a situation where there's a human being depending on you. And my wife does an incredible job of like, holding back the tidal wave there. But at the beginning of the process, it was very much a, you know, the baby's in the room with you, you get like 90 minutes at a time before stuff kicks off. And that is like,

• 3:55Speaker 00

  I think you start to reflect on the fact that the space, that the space that I had before led to a lot of the, you know, the best work is not necessarily, I think Morgan Housel talks about this, it's, it's not when you're doing the work, it's all the thinking that you do for days on end, and then you just arrive at this epiphany. And you're, you know, when a child is really small and you're looking after it, then those windows to create epiphanies are drastically compressed. So you feel like, at the start there, it's like, am I ever gonna get like 90 minutes of clear thought time? And that's also a product of it being your first baby and you're like, you know,

• 4:38Speaker 00

  you can't walk two steps away, you're really nervous. And I've heard these stories about people have their second baby in the hospital and they're just like, oh yeah, it'd be fine, you know. But when you're like first time parents, you're just panicking about, oh, he's making that noise, he's making this noise, is he all right? You need to call somebody.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  And you just you just realize how much like subconscious, like, how much work your subconscious was doing previously because it was unencumbered with like the thought of having to protect and raise another human being. So just that like leveling out over time has has been a big adjustment and also just looking at time in a different way. So it's like, if you have an hour, be a lot more intentional with how you use that hour if you can, you know, and sometimes that's not possible. But yeah, it definitely gives you an instant perspective shift in the short term. And, you know, what am I, what am I, what am I doing?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  What I want to teach somebody? How do you want, like, what do you want the trajectory of your life to be now that you're in a very different situation than you were a few months previous? So, yeah, I mean, it's the the shift in thinking is kind of profound in every direction. It's hard to even articulate a lot of the the different mental models that emerge as a result of it.

• 6:00Chris Williamson?

  It's such a multipolar, multidiscipline, multimodal change, right? You've just got all of these inputs and experiences layered with emotions and all manner of other things. It doesn't surprise me that it's hard to condense down, especially as someone who does this for a living, right? Like, you synthesize complex ideas as a job. That's your, that's your profession.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:21Chris Williamson?

  And you're struggling to do it. I think as well, an interesting takeaway from what you've just said there is to go back to deep work that Cal Newport says. He talks about how social media particularly can fragment your days into blocks of time so small that it's impossible to get any meaningful work done at all. To some people who perhaps have a less mindful relationship with their social media feed than you do, their Twitter is your child, constantly crying in the background, constantly permeating the subconscious, just this ambient anxiety that, oh, I might have a notification or, oh, I need to check whatever's, whatever's happening online.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, absolutely. I think there you can, you can have those tracks running with a level of importance assigned to them that is not consistent with how important they actually are, right? This is an exception to the rule.

• 7:18Chris Williamson?

  The problem is, over time, you habituate, you just, that myelin gets wrapped so hard in your brain and it gets wired down so hard that it no longer is a conscious decision. It was just a race to the bottom of the brainstem and now you just type in TW on your browser thing before you even know it, which everyone's got, right? Everyone's got the TW reflex.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  T, T in a lot of cases, you've gotten down to T.

• 7:45Chris Williamson?

  Have you? Okay, fair enough.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  So, but the other, the other thing that makes me think of is, is those things become so, so much a part of your routine that you, it's difficult to subtract them from what the actual driver of progress is, right? It's like, it almost becomes a part of the pattern so heavily that you're like, if I stop doing that, then this result is going to stop showing up. And it's because it's tapping on so many of those like primal, I'm not a biologist, but there is countless numbers of reports, research, like into how much that is like drilled into your biology at this point. It's so hard to separate it. And

• 8:30Speaker 00

  I've gone through a number of like feasts and famines or like fasts on like social stuff. And the idea that staying stuck in that feedback loop is good for the long-term results of a business is a myth in most cases.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  So many people, myself included, struggle to work out what the effective inputs are that are causing the right outputs to occur. And my industry nightlife, right? It is so messy to work out. There's no such thing as direct marketing. There's the brand, everything you do is branding, right? So you have no idea. Why is a night cool? Why is an event cool? No one knows. It just is.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  If you know, then it's not cool, right?

• 9:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, exactly. If you know, you don't know. And it's, so what we're trying to do, we're like, me and my business partner have this conversation every year. Do we need to spend as much as we are on and then pick any different category on guest listers, on online marketing, on physical marketing, on DJs, on bookings, on celebrity PAs, on whatever it is. And we always come back to, I don't know, because I don't know what's causing the night to be effective. But systemically, from a habit sense, a lot of the time, especially if you've found a modicum of success. What you can do is go right. Nobody fucking move. Nobody move at all. Just stay right where you are.

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  Continue to do the thing that you're doing because this appears to be less broken than it was before. So let's not try and fix it.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, spot on. I think the smaller the business, the more that's true, right? Because you haven't crossed the chasm into systems and delegation to the point where you can start to you can start to identify what's working and what isn't. But I think there's also this weird middle ground between something being really special and unique and small, which produces cool things typically. And then these behemoths that are more commoditized, like low margin businesses that have spent decades making systems. And you can get stuck in the middle really easily. And I built a business like that a few years ago, and it was absolutely horrible. Like productized agency service business. It's just the most brutal thing you can imagine. And it's just a race to the bottom.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  So, uh, yeah, it's, uh, that this whole idea of the creator economy or being the solo capitalist. All of those traps are very, very dangerous and hard to avoid for sure.

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  What else did you learn? Any other things from integrating fatherhood?

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Mums, man. Mums are just unbelievable. My wife's resilience is just like, just next level, man. Like you, I think, uh, somebody told me the other week, they've got a really good friend who was like SEAL Team Six, uh, you know, like insane, top tier military veteran, had his first baby a few months ago. And he's like, this is the most brutal thing I've ever experienced. Yeah. And it's like, can you even, and you're the dude in the relationship. It's like, you don't have the, like, the biological, you know, physical stress that, that, um,

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Mum goes through and it's just remarkable to watch and you have just a newfound appreciation for your own mum, for everybody else that has raised a child, people that are raising kids on their own. It's just, just remarkable, man. That's definitely the biggest takeaway is like mercenaries, mums are just mercenaries.

• 12:06Chris Williamson?

  Just total killers. What about, what about taking time off then? So you have this child, you want to be a good dad, you want to spend time with them, you also want to enjoy the experience, right? You know, this is the first time you're gonna have, the only time you're gonna have a first child. So you think, I want to immerse myself in this, which presumably meant you took time away from the business.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:26Chris Williamson?

  But there's algorithm loops occurring here, there's the fear of being less seen. Did you get anxiety about spending time off?

• 12:35Speaker 00

  So, interestingly enough, like the first few weeks, I was like, I didn't really, I was really focused on like, what's the high leverage stuff, right? Like, what are the like, two or three things I can send out a day, or where can I pull like, stuff from the archives that hasn't been out for two years and just surface it back up? And that kind of kept the momentum going and you're running on adrenaline for a little while, the first few weeks. It's like, oh, I can get on my phone for 15 minutes and then you're just so wired that you can go back and experience fully, um, like, family time too. And then when the toll start, or when the like, sleep deprivation starts to catch up with you, it's like, what I was talking about at the beginning of the conversation, where are these original thoughts gonna come from? And where is the like, the

• 13:20Speaker 00

  window of time to start to, um, you know, when's that start to open up? So you can start to produce at the same level you were before. Uh, yeah, you start to think, man, am I ever gonna recover? Or I'm ever gonna get back to that rhythm that I was in before? And, um, yeah, you start to realize that there's, logically, the risk is low, right? There's like, you've built a huge network, you can go back and kind of, there's this anti fragility to building an online business and a, a brand under your own name, which would- Short of like nuclear fallout disaster, there's not, I'm not really worried about opportunity on a grand scale.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  It's like even like freelance clients or whatever else, but to sort of lose the momentum of a hu- of a huge thing is something that you start to get anxious about. It's uh, cause like you say, the, the, the way your content gets shown and you work on YouTube, which I think is even more

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  Ficious.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  brutal than something like a Twitter where there is some element of um, I want to say meritocracy, but if you get the, if you plug into the right thing at the right time, you can have these outsized results, right? Whereas YouTube is the grinders, like, like you have to get this many people watching it for this mo- this percent of time over this period.

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  You're so at the mercy of the algorithm on YouTube, I think more than any other platform.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and um, I, I, I started to get that YouTube momentum maybe a year ago and I, I've not come back to YouTube very seriously because of that, because it's like, man, I need to really decide to do it and pursue it properly. But yeah, you start to see it showing up all over the place and you, yeah, it's, it's just a reframing of reframing in general, I think the

• 15:18Speaker 00

  the world is changing in a lot of ways too, where you think about that like feast, feast and fast mode of creativity and in the type, that like the type of business that I've built, you really can do like a month of intense work, do a launch and then go, go away for three, six months, make something, come back. That's never been how I've operated, but I don't think that's not an option. So it's kind of,

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Sean Puri had this really great uh analogy where he's like, if you have like a loyal network of people, you have essentially a stem cell. So you can use it to

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Produce anything you want, right? You could turn that into this execution or this product, or you could build a community, or you could like sell physical product. There's all these different ways that you can like apply this, uh, these relationships that you've built at scale. But if you're just used to this like muscle repetition that you've been in, you, you lose sight of some of those other possible executions. So if the, if the situation changes, you have to zoom out a little bit and be like, okay, there's, there's still like, did you see that Tim Urban graphic, the wait but why the path dependency thing? It's very, very, uh,

• 16:42Speaker 00

  that kind of conjures up that image in my mind too. It's like you've gotten here by posting six images a day to Twitter, but you don't have to get there by continuing to do that necessarily. If that makes sense.

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, it's so interesting, man. It goes back to the right. We found some success. Please, nobody change anything. And especially as a one man army, you think, well, there's only me and my own neuroticism to deal with with this. I've just got my own thought loops and no one really to pull me out of it. You know, when one of the advantages, I suppose that you get other than scale and the ability to, uh, pass work down to people and delegate and stuff like that. One of the advantages you get is the pattern break within your own neuroticism in a business. If you have a conversation with somebody else and they go, well, let me just

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  challenge you on, on that idea for a second. Cause I'm, I'm not sure, but you, you are only you, right? And you're holding on to this success that you've built bread and butter, ground floor up. You've seen it every single step of the way. Sat there on Photoshop or After Effects or whatever it is that you're doing continuously iterating and coming up with ideas. And then somehow you need to have a new perspective because there's a child in the mix.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and like abandoning the abandoning the thing that works in in favor of something uncertain. When you're weighing up the cost of the time you, you know, the time you get back versus the, you know, the momentum that you forego. And I'm like, my wife is,

• 18:26Speaker 00

  it's like an incredible feedback loop and none of this would have happened on the business side without her either. It's like that doing it like really solo is is just probably incredibly intense. And I imagine there are very few people that have no form of like local feedback loop. This like that's been a huge, huge advantage.

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  Did you notice, did you notice drop off then with regards to reach or conversions or whatever with Twitter and with Instagram during that break?

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty. I mean, you can map it on a graph. It's like we moved, we moved house in August of last year as well. And the charts go on like that. And then we move the month, it just completely tanks and then it's back up again. Because you just, there's, there's leverage, but there isn't.

• 19:17Chris Williamson?

  Momentum.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  There isn't just like imaginary momentum happening, right? You can, you can create a leverage result, but you're not like, I think that's this myth of passive income that people talk about where it's like, oh, I wanna, I wanna build passive income. It's like you could build leveraged income and maybe there are some forms of passive income that open up to you when you have just absurd amounts of capital, for example, but to live off of passive income when you're starting out is, is a myth, in my opinion. You need to pursue leveraged income where input is disconnected from output in just an outrageous. It's like how clever you can be rather than just how hard you can grind.

• 19:59Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's a bomb. I really, really like that. The fact that people get confused with passive income. What they think is input-free outcomes. That's not what you get. You just get to overly magnify the inputs.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think if you've managed to create leveraged income for long enough that you have access to truly passive investments, that is possible, but it's like rarefied air.

• 20:27Chris Williamson?

  It's not within the creator economy. It's not within the things that we're talking about here. David Perel can't do rite of passage and not be there. But people are there for David Perel. Like, I had a conversation with him the other week, and he was like, dude, for two months of the year, twice a year, I stopped my life. All I do is rite of passage. Ali Abdaal with his part-time YouTuber Academy. The guy just lives and breathes, and his team now that he's got this huge, big, fat team because these cohort-based courses are significantly more resource-intensive than obviously just a buy and pay-to-play type thing. And man, these guys, that's it. That's their life for a period. So, yes, it's leveraged income.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, there is a degree of passivity to it because you don't have to be there as each person buys, but it's just magnification, not true passiveness.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and maybe your labor slowly reduces over time, or the intensity of your, like, the necessity of your physical presence, but then that will switch to mental presence, right? Then you have to be a great operator, and that's still effort and decision-making and, yeah, judgment at scale rather than just leverage via some technology like being able to broadcast by video, something like that. It's like building a team that can keep doing that.

• 21:53Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that means that you need to love the grind and you need to love the work even more so because a lot of the time people look at the "this is pointless" graph, for instance, from Visualized Value, and they presume that, okay, so once I hit inflection point and I get these to-the-moon gains, I then get to take my foot off the gas and the rocket continues to go up. And you're like, no, you just get to magnify the amount of effort versus outcome that you get.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's, what is it, the Matthew principle?

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  To more will be given to those who have gotten.

• 22:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are some of the unseen challenges with your type of business? Forget the child. What are some of the things that people wouldn't think or don't see that you face?

• 22:43Speaker 00

  I think you touched on it there. I think it's the, um, the shiny objects is definitely one. So you'll get to a point where it makes very little sense to do.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  But it makes up, you really have to be good at identifying what the leveraged things are. And it gets, it gets dicey after a period of time where, um,

• 23:13Speaker 00

  trying to think of a concrete example here. So building like, building the MVP of a product and getting it out, then getting stuck in like the iterations of that product, for example, is like, I don't know the exact phrase, but it's like, um, there's such a marginal return on all of that tweaking that should be spent on, you know, getting feedback from people, building relationships with people, meeting new people. I think that the inability to zoom out and recognize what the, what the true points of leverage are. I think maybe the biggest takeaway is the, the idea of self-promotion.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  So I think this is another thing in the, that could be extracted from that graph. It's like past a certain point, you think that everybody's out there doing your promotion work for you, right? Everybody's out there talking about your stuff and hey, like I've published this many episodes. So now everything's going to take care of itself. And it's pretty remarkable, like even with a really sizable reach, like the world, a world that moves at the speed of the internet will forget about you in 15 minutes. If you don't keep showing up.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  So how do you maintain this sense of perspective? You have certain things, a small number of tasks or operations that you do that add the most value, that achieve the most leverage. How do you avoid being caught up in the shiny object syndrome?

• 24:49Speaker 00

  It's a hard one. I think there is some weird responsibility to allocate a certain amount of time to pursuing shiny objects. I've discovered in the last like six months or so. So there are certain things that are changing at a macro level that you want to stay plugged into essentially. But the perspective I think that's helpful is that just understanding what the like, what the engine is. And for me, that's like producing the visuals. For you, that would be like recording and publishing the interviews. And sometimes in pursuit of those, in pursuit of those shiny objects that aren't, that

• 25:34Speaker 00

  isn't, it's not the work itself, right? It's just a different way to deploy the work, or a different way to think about the work, or a different medium for the work. None of it is a replacement. And I think where we lose perspective is when we start to think of it as a replacement for doing the work itself. So that's constantly, how I find perspective and like, reset that is like, okay, none of this would have happened if I didn't show up and make these images and post them every day. It's that simple. You just go back to that. It's like, if I'm lost, or I'm like, oh, momentum is waning somewhere. It's like, go and pick up a book, find like 10 ideas that are resonating with you, get

• 26:15Speaker 00

  in front of the computer, turn them into visuals, post them. And then like, all of these opportunities that will come three, six, nine months down the road, you may not know exactly what those things are. But the one thing that you have to commit to is the, you know, the catalyst that's going to bring the opportunities to you. And I think we can sort of lose perspective that that's the input that's, that's generating those outputs down the road. And that this is pointless graph is essentially trying to illustrate that. Like, I could not have possibly predicted.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  The Naval book is a great example, right? The like, starting to post these images of ideas that Naval has published as a way to find these tiny consulting gigs to get people to pay me to like, design a landing page for them. Nine months later, there's like, I have an illustrator credit in a book on Amazon. It's like, that's nuts. And that was never, ever, like, I did not pursue that opportunity by directly. So it's about like this, you're pursuing something and then all of these opportunities kind of start to pop out at you indirectly as a result of you just like practicing in public.

• 27:30Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I've noticed, again, going back to the club promo example, me and my business partner used to tell people to come to nightclubs for a long time. We didn't have managers. I would manage all of the networkers. And then over time, you're like, right, okay, well, if we're going to run two or three or four nights a week, I need to scale myself up, right? So I need to get some managers in between me and the networkers because I can't manage 500 members of staff that are all guest listing for us. And then, okay, well, I mean, if we've got 11 managers or 12 managers and four nights, we probably could do with a night manager that'll look after each of them. And it's that story, I think it's from the E-Myth, where there's a lady that has a bakery and she wants to build a bakery, factory or something.

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  And then, three years later, she goes in to have a look at the people making the bakery stuff that loves a bread and she, they don't know who she is. She hasn't got a clue how the bread's made anymore. And a lot of the time, I think we use that paradigm as an individual creator. We take the paradigm of a big business and we throw that over the top. We get so caught up operationally, day to day, dealing with emails, dealing with the back and forth. Perfect example for the podcast is dealing with advertisers and recording the pre-roll intros. Like, that's what generates the majority of the revenue. Have you paid your invoice? What are the talking points that we need to talk about? Have I tried the product? Do I think the product's any good or not? Back and forth with them.

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  What rates are we going for? How long is it going to happen? And that. Takes up just as much energy and time and effort as the thing which is the reason that you are successful and have enabled those opportunities in the first place.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:09Chris Williamson?

  And focusing on the core and staying as lean as possible. I mean, it's an, it's an argument for just uncomplicating the entire business process to have a single product, one thing perhaps, or one channel, you know? And I think Anthony Pompliano has done this quite well in that he did one network at the time. Is that right? I'm going to crush Twitter. I'm going to crush podcasting. James Clear as well. I'm going to crush blogging, then I'm going to crush newsletter, then I'll do book. And I think he's now about to start podcasting or something like that. So some of the smartest people are constraining the amount of shiny objects and operations that they can become distracted by because they know over time, you will end up doing

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  so much of the ancillary shit around the outside that somebody who doesn't have those complications will come in and punch a hole in the middle of what you were supposed to be the market leader for.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's osmosis. It's like, oh, serious businesses or proper businesses do this. Like, I need more SKUs. I need like more channels. And it's like reading a BuzzFeed article on how to be a good marketer, right? It's like do this on Facebook and do that on Twitter and do it. It's like, it's not really advice. It doesn't actually say anything. It's more like figure out, like, figure out the engine. And we talked about the, like, if there's some selfish component to that engine, then that's how you win either way,

• 30:43Speaker 00

  right? The, the ability to turn an idea into a visual is not something that is only commercially viable or monetizable through a Twitter account. It's like a thing that you can do for people and on a one-to-one basis. So you have this like net that sits below the thing you're doing and you're adding leverage to it. I think it's very easy to get distracted by,

• 31:13Speaker 00

  or I don't, I don't know your exact story, but you were doing something else as well as building up this podcasting empire that is now six-figure subscribers on YouTube. It wasn't like. Hey, I'm Chris and I'm starting this business. I'm quitting everything else and I'm just gonna start my YouTube channel. Because that would have been, you would have.

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  Ballsy.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, ballsy, but also incredibly difficult to monetize from day one, right? That idea that concentrating your efforts until something becomes much easier to point at as an asset to monetize rather than this like sprawling beast where you don't really know where the the points of leverage are. So it's, yeah, the rules. The rules don't apply the same way to the individual creator as they do the, you know, the small business or the big business and that's. People read a lot of books with those rules in them and and follow them and lose the edge that they would have created otherwise, which is,

• 32:23Speaker 00

  you know, the internet has enabled very different type of business to exist and be monetized than something that needs 15 middle managers to operate.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  All of the rules are out of the window there. I really wonder, it's got me thinking whether there's a, an argument to be made that you constrain the upper bound on how much you grow or how many different things you try and do. You have all of these potential opportunities that are going to come to you, but they might arrive before you've finished dominating the core or before you've reached a degree of power law inflection that is high enough that it's it's unfailable now. Nothing, nothing can add weight to the bottom of this rocket. We're going to the moon, like jump on board.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  And I would guess that most creators, unless you are incredibly disciplined or single minded or absolutely adore the thing that you do.

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  We'll start to see these opportunities coming in and see them as viable business strategies. Well, look, this is what traditional precisely. And then that's when the rocket starts to run out of speed. There could be a way you could imagine a world in which you spent all of your time dealing with customer inquiries about courses and having calls with interesting people that want to just talk about your visuals and little side projects and this, that and the other, and end up dedicating single digit hours per week or less to the thing that makes you renowned on the internet. And the same goes for the podcasts, spending all the time speaking to the advertisers or dealing with guests or scheduling or whatever it is. It's like, look,

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  did you make this work when you first started? Yes. What was the thing? Why is what is the reason that people come to you? What is the very, very core of the product? Because this is the difference, right? When you think about someone like Nike, Nike have shoes, but their shoes really aren't that much different to an Adidas pair shoe or a Puma pair shoe. What you're buying are all of the ancillary benefits, right? And the outside of the onion. The reverse is true in the creator economy. Everybody's got the extraneous stuff because people can make nice podcast artwork or people can get the same, people can even get the same guests as you can have the same guests as you. They can read the same books that you do and summarize them. What

• 34:44Chris Williamson?

  is the thing that you have? What is the UVP that you bring to the market? That's the thing that you need to continue focusing on.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was thinking about this idea the other day. And David Perel, I think, labeled this maybe as good as it's ever going to be labeled, the personal monopoly. You have the personal monopoly and then you have the monopoly. So the other idea I was thinking about is you have Amazon and then you have the artisan. These are like the barbell ends of the economy that we're barreling towards is like if you have a, you know, to quote a

• 35:25Speaker 00

  The gnarly Jeff Bezos, your margin is my opportunity, right? The any business that traffics commodities in any definition is gonna get eaten up by Amazon short of some regulatory body standing in the way, like Amazon hospitals, Amazon, everything. Versus the, you know, three billion media brands that people can start, and maybe it's not exclusive to just media, but it's like the very small, um, media is probably the best example, the very small media business that is, the only way you avoid being a commodity is leaning into something so extremely specific that people can't get anywhere else, whether

• 36:10Speaker 00

  that's like your personality, whether it's like the creative output of your process of some kind, or it's you, the way you an app, the way you analyze a company, um, there's great examples of of that all over Twitter, people that do the same thing as the Wall Street Journal in essence, right? For the uninformed observer, the Wall Street Journal is gonna give you a report on a business, and so is someone like Paddy McCormick or Mario Gabrielle, but people pay hundreds of dollars a year to read, uh, Paddy's analysis because he's funny, or like they like the way he looks at the world, um, but you can easily get stuck in the middle of that chasm

• 36:50Speaker 00

  in like, uh, you know, sort of mediocre publishing firm that doesn't really stand out from either of the two. So it feels like maybe I'm so close to it that I feel like it's happening really fast, but it does feel like a trend that is that is taken hold at this point.

• 37:08Chris Williamson?

  Do you suffer with product fatigue? Obviously, you've got these courses that you put out now, those are one of the big drivers of revenue for you, but you need to, no one's gonna buy a course twice, right?

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely a.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  It's definitely a huge consideration. So also, there's some ethical thing there where a lot of my knowledge is in these two things at this point. So like I had the 10 year career and then produced two products that summarize what I learned in 10 years. And I'm still learning between when I published those and now, but those learnings are really modifications to the products that already exist. They're not brand new things, or at least I don't feel comfortable making them into brand new things. And the thing you have to square with that is like the market get the market is like their attention span is so low. So it's like that stuff is old at this point. And you'll see, you know,

• 38:07Speaker 00

  businesses like, I won't name any names, right? But some people will put out 25, 30 courses on kind of the same thing, maybe framed a little bit differently, new name, new cover, new guest speaker, in order to just keep the attention of the market, which, you know, you can make an argument that that's like, the market makes the decision, like if they buy it, then great. But personally, like, that just does not fire me up. So I'm always

• 38:43Speaker 00

  I'm now like, maybe 50 50. So there's product development, there's like community stuff that has existed from the first round of visualized value products. And then 50% of my time is spent on like, what is the next thing? What are the new mediums that I can go and take a massive risk on for six months because I have a parachute? And then I can bring that knowledge back to the people that maybe are where I was two, three, four years ago, if we continue to go the knowledge route. There's also just like, this is a whole other rabbit hole. Like a lot of web three technologies that I've been introduced to the NFT stuff, like that whole crypto market is fascinating

• 39:26Speaker 00

  to me right now, which is causing a like circle of learning and trying to figure out how to how to dive into that world too. So yeah, product fatigue is definitely real and

• 39:40Speaker 00

  The way to, it's just a difficult thing to address in a world that has like a really, really short attention span. It's very hard to address product fatigue unless you're in a publishing business that's, you know, like your business is a perfect example of this. It's like you do the same thing over and over again. You love doing it and it always produces new output over time. And in a way, like visualized value gets more diluted, the more it produces, if that makes sense. Like some of the, some of the things that I really want people to take on board that help me, like there's, you, you could argue that you do a disservice at a certain point by adding too much.

• 40:26Chris Williamson?

  There's only so many ways that you can describe the same concepts, right? And the issue that you have as an individual creator that is completely self-powered, as you are, as opposed to the way that I am, where I get to ride off the back of each person that I speak to, you have a upper bound on your inspiration level. You have an upper bound on your life experience as well.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:51Chris Williamson?

  And we've talked about this before, but I think it's so fascinating, the difference between a media, the type that I do, where I get to continuously get extra little turbo boosts on Mario Kart. I just jump on it's like, oh, it's a Jordan Peterson turbo boost. No, no, it's a Jack Butcher turbo boost. Now it's a Seth Godin turbo boost. And all that I need to do is just be a mirror for that energy. I get to take all that they're doing and you kind of just become a bit of a pedestal or a platform. And even if you look to YouTubers, you know, you look to the Ali Abdaals of the world, they're kind of still doing that. There's a little bit more distance between them and the person that they're talking about or the concept that they're talking about. But there's more

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  degrees of freedom with regards to how they can communicate those conversations and those topics. But yeah, it really is.

• 41:44Chris Williamson?

  There's something that you lose from being a podcaster specifically in that it's the least viral of all of the creator industries as far as I can see. Like if you want to make money fast, podcasting is not the way to go because it just, there's no associated virality with it specifically not on audio. But what you do get is insane longevity because you essentially have a bottomless pit of interesting people to speak to. I'm never going to run out of interesting people to speak to. You know, Rogan's what 1800 episodes in, still going like an absolute champ. Three episodes, four episodes a week sometimes, two episodes in a day sometimes because he can and because he's got this curiosity that is his driver internally and he gets this extra engine that comes from the other people. Whereas when you are this solo creator, which you know,

• 42:29Chris Williamson?

  you have become a role model, I'm sure for tons and tons of people that think, right, fuck it. I am ditching the shitty job that I do not like. I don't want to spend my time here anymore. Jack Butcher made it happen. I can make it happen, which is awesome. Like that's fantastic. But you are still on the upward curve of that hockey stick. What people haven't yet seen is what it sounds like we're now beginning to encounter, which is, okay, first set of rocket boosters have fallen away. Now how do I apply the second fuel cell to keep me going?

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes, that's a good analogy. The idea that

• 43:12Speaker 00

  I think this is an unattributed quote. It's like, young people have ideas, old people have money. So you see this transition happen everywhere. It's like people make money and then they become investors or they have like this feedback loop beneath them where, you know, you build a network and then you can power the network behind you with, you know, that have kind of a slight take thing that you, you built up or are deploying your expertise in a new way. I think these like, and web three is a good example of this, like these-

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  What is web three? I have no idea what that is.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  So-

• 43:49Speaker 00

  I'll do a horrible job explaining it, but essentially the evolution of the web, the best description I've heard, the shortest description I've heard, Web 1.0 is information links, right? So it's you publish information, you can link from one article to another, from one institution to another. Universities use Web 1.0. Web 2.0 is social links. So it's, hey, Twitter, Facebook, like, I know Chris, I met Chris, we've built a relationship that way, I've published a bunch of podcasts. And then Web 3.0 is economic links. So it's like experimenting with new ways to incentivize people to create. So there's like decentralized organizations being incorporated where you have,

• 44:31Speaker 00

  you know, people working on a project in 15 different countries, they raise money from everywhere, and then they give back a portion of what they earn on the first round of their project to everybody that backed it. So it's kind of just stripping away some of the formality of building businesses. And that is just creating a bunch of like crazy new ways to do things online. So NFTs is like the, you know, the most, I think the shortest leap for people to understand what Web 3.0 is. Like, how does a digital artist start to collect revenue for their work?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  But the nuances that you can achieve with a smart contract are far beyond like selling a piece of physical art. So it could be 15 people make this piece of art and then they all split the proceeds. And then as this thing gets licensed and used in other places, there's a contract that pays them royalties. So all of the like monetization structures that YouTube, for example, are taking, I don't know what percent now, probably something crazy, but they give you a ton of distribution. So it makes sense. Logical argument as to why they take some of that, but this new ecosystem that is being

• 45:48Speaker 00

  built, I think is is playing into that idea of like one plus one equals three in some cases. So like where I end up after booster set of boosters one falls off might be, oh, this person is publishing a book that is that would really benefit from having these their ideas visualized, for example. So I'm going to enter into an agreement with them where I want X percent of the sales of this book. And then we get into some mutually incentivized, not to say you couldn't do that without crypto, but it just makes it easier. And even digital access to this content can be, you know, you can monetize it and get rewarded for

• 46:32Speaker 00

  it. So it still feels to me like there's going to be a huge power law, a huge power law distribution among the people that make it to one side of the curve and don't, as in everything else. But there's some really interesting technology being developed to just change some incentive structures in in building creative work on the internet. And I am not an expert by any means. I would love to send some links for anybody that wants to read about it because there's a lot of people smarter than me that have written about it. And yeah, we'll see where it goes.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  Send them over. I'll put it in the the show notes below. One of the things we've talked about today a lot has been this sort of power law and this inflection point graph. And most people have some form of real world example of this hockey stick of returns. I have mine, you have yours, pretty much everyone has theirs as well. Can you take us back to before you hit the inflection point where you were at the this is pointless bit of the visualized value graph? Can you remember the sort of thoughts that you had around then?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think if we talk about it in the specific context of an internet business, this is before you really understand the power of network effects is how I can now like retroactively look at it. So you're only experiencing the downside of network effects at the beginning, like you're embarrassed to publish stuff. Like I've got screenshots of the stuff I was posting on Facebook three years ago, and my mom is the only person who's interacting with it. And you look back at that now, you're like, why am I putting like, I would go out and meet people and they're like, what the hell are you doing now? Like, you quit your job and now all I see you doing is like posting, like, are you a motivational speaker? Someone asked me once, I was like, no, no, I'm working on

• 48:26Speaker 00

  a design agency. And they're like, all right, cool. Good luck. And it was just like, it was fricking brutal, man. It's like you publish this stuff and nobody interacts with it. But now in hindsight, it's like, one, it thickens your skin, which is a totally different conversation. But two, there's this network effect happening that you can't even fathom. Like, there are people that won't even interact with the stuff you're doing, but they're consuming it, right? Like, if you, this is actually a link that I'll send. This is thesis that someone wrote about branding, where you think about, I think George Mack wrote

• 49:09Speaker 00

  about this in his email recently, where he says, there's a different version of you that exists inside everybody's head that you've ever met. Like, your mom has a different version of you than your significant other, than like the person who reads your tweets, than whoever else, right? There's all these different abstractions of you. And I think when you're at the this is pointless phase, you are creating those abstractions, but you can't really fathom the long-term consequences of those, like, of all of those individual, like, ideas that you're planting, or all of those like connections that you're making. Because somebody has probably got a name for this, but there's like a social cost to interacting with your content when it's not popular. So

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  It's low, it's seen as low status, right?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that, breaking that, I have no idea when that inflection point comes, but it, in, you know, in people that are having this conversation, it did come at a certain point. And

• 50:12Speaker 00

  The other part of it for me was the cost associated with like a few people not really understanding what I was doing was lower to me than having time and economic freedom, right? So that was the everything's a trade-off and that was what I was trading was like being misunderstood for like rolling the dice at that point at being free. So the the early payoffs of stuff like that were private conversations that people would reach out to me. They wouldn't interact with the stuff like, hey, Jack, I like what you're doing. You need to explain to me how

• 50:51Speaker 00

  you might like approach something for my business in this vein. And it, you know, it's hundreds of reps before you get a conversation like that. And it's because you believe somebody that's done it in front of you. Like, I didn't do this out of nowhere. Like, I saw people doing it. I listened to people that were doing it.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  So Seth Godin's books I read in maybe 2017, The Dip. When did This Is Marketing come out? I think that was a bit later, but read a lot of his stuff. And I was like, you know what? This guy's like, maybe my favorite, like, my favorite writer. And he seems to, he seems to have done all right for himself. I know I'm not on that level by any means. Like, I can't articulate ideas the way he could. And but you know what? The, maybe there's just a few like shifts in perspective along the way where it's like, I only need 10 people to believe in me to have

• 51:52Speaker 00

  like a six-figure consulting business. So do I keep posting stuff on Facebook for a few more months and try and get a few more clients? Or do I go back to work at a job?

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  So were you, at this, at this point, were you conscious, were you cognizant of that perspective? Had you sat down with yourself beforehand and said, some people are not going to get this. This is a trade-off which is worthwhile. How much of this is being post hoc rationalized?

• 52:26Speaker 00

  No, I think I had that at the time. I think I was experiencing that at the time. And I really didn't get it. I had lunch with someone on Sunday who runs a business that has a, I don't know, four million email subscribers. And they were like, yeah, you know, I still don't really understand like the potential of the internet. It's like just crazy, man. Like you're always behind the puck, right? You're always underestimating the power of what you're doing today. If you're being consistent and putting stuff out, you're always underestimating the just fractal, like crazy effects that show up months and months or years later in some cases.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  And I think this is another idea that I've always struggled to articulate, but the, just the notion that you did something for 12 months consistently, if nobody interacts with it, I would honestly challenge anybody on the planet, if you did something every day for 365 days, like some creative exercise and posted it. If you couldn't like create like one commercial opportunity off the back of that, I just don't think it's possible. Like just the very, like the fact that, you know, this is like proof of work and the concept of a CV taken to a new level. The idea that, hey, even nobody's interacting with this stuff, you know what I'm

• 53:50Speaker 00

  capable of because you've seen me do it every single day. So like at the very least, someone might bring me into their business to help, to help them achieve that result, whether it's

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  Dude, Jim O'Shaughnessy on the show the other day, he said he hired some new guy who's maybe from Bangladesh or India or something, didn't need to see his CV, he just followed him on Twitter for nine months, looked at what he was putting out on Twitter and thought, that's my guy, that's proof of work. I can't remember who it was that said, the top nine images on your Instagram grid are the new CV. Yeah, well, it's not actually all that far off. And here's an interesting stat talking about the consistency thing. So 90% of podcasts that are launched don't make it past episode three. And of the 10% that make it past episode three, 90% don't make it past episode 20.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  So simply by producing 21 podcasts, you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  1%, right? Yeah. Just crazy, man. I don't think people can understand that. Like, that is crazy.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. And just...

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're in the top 1% and you've already like started to create effects that you are, you know, unaware of at that point. Like, three podcast episodes, you could make the argument that six months' time, nothing's going to be different. But 21 is like, it's not, it's not 17 episodes different. It's like an order of magnitude more compelling, convincing. And I think that, that is, you know, you talk about Matthew principle, you talk about anything that's like, your thousand and first image isn't like a plus one, it's a plus like 150. It's just a, it's a different beast.

• 55:48Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that someone makes it happen then, or they start to make it happen, they start to feel that hockey stick kick in. How, do you have a strategy for sustaining power laws and keeping inflection points going?

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think this is a, this is kind of non-tangible advice, but it's like, you've honed your gut to the point where you can get there. Then I think some of it comes back to like trusting your instinct. So...

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Like, that point in time where I'm producing stuff and no one's interacting with it, it's, it's all like information, information that's being fed to you in some way. I'm, I'm working on a project right now with a few guys and we had an idea, we went from like idea in a Discord channel to execution and like... Two hours. It's like, here's the idea, something like mock this up, do that, do that, do that. And you get, you arrive at this place and it's three people I really trust. And we're all like, man, we did that so fast. That can't be right, right? That can't be the, it can't be the answer. Like, let's go and explore a bunch of other stuff and we'll come back in 10 days. And it's like, no, the first thing was the right thing because it's not two hours of work, right?

• 57:03Speaker 00

  It's, it's the collective 30 years of experience between all of you that produced that first result. But you, for whatever reason, your, you know, your gut needs proof from your mind that it was right. So you have to go and pursue these like ridiculous angles and then you end up back at the place you began. So I think when you've gotten to any inflection point, understanding that there's some intangible, you have some intangible ability or you have an instinct that allowed you to create that result in the first place.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  Inflection point's there for a reason, right? The hockey sticks happened for something.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  So your ability to like lean into your instinct and keep like even if it feels at times like you're, I don't know, abandoning the set of rules that got you, you know, there's, there's plenty of people that said that, like what got, what get you, what got you here won't get you there. It's the second set of boosters falling off or whatever you analogy you want to use. I like that one, but the idea that especially if it's like, all of the examples we're talking about is a network effects, right? And you have a huge number of people paying attention to what you're doing.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  It's then like trusting your instinct and going back to those people with like the newest iteration of your instinct. Get feedback from them and then if you're right, you just keep going.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  To continue the space shuttle analogy going, even if the booster rockets do get added on, the payload remains the same. Right, right. You know, it's still the same astronauts that are at the front, or it's still the same payload that's being delivered into space. It's just, how am I going to propel this now? So many of the things that I think we've talked about today are around this weird combination of self-confidence, sort of trust in what you are, the intangibles, the source code of all of the different experiences that have kind of just made something that you have, that you offer the market, that maybe is a little bit difficult to define.

• 59:17Chris Williamson?

  Having faith in that consistency, the importance of consistency, because without consistency, you can't iterate. And consistency is basically just shots at goal. The more shots at goal you take, the more gold that you're potentially going to score. And then there's this sort of beautiful, this beautiful perspective that you need to be able to see the extraneous stuff, to be able to observe all of the different opportunities, but not get bogged down in the opportunities. And yeah, I am. It's like the essentialism thing, right? Like, what is the vital few areas of contribution that will make the vast amount of difference? Eighty percent of the effort that you put in will, or eighty percent of the results that you will get will come from twenty percent of the of the inputs. But a lot of the time, we can flip that around

• 1:00:02Chris Williamson?

  and we start wasting so much time getting distracted with the new opportunities or getting distracted with the idea that there does need to be something different or changed, losing faith in what it is that we do, stopping being consistent because we've got so many other different projects coming in and different opportunities that we start to slow down. And the beauty that you have with leverage is that one good idea iterated consistently is essentially an endless goldmine. It's, it literally is a bottomless pit of opportunities. And yeah, as you said, I need new ideas. I need to keep things fresh. But there is a core to what it is that you offer the market and continuing to stay with that is important.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  And this, somewhere in between all of this is the X factor, right? It's the right amount of variety, the right amount of explore and the right amount of exploit that you have between them. I need a little bit of new, but I need to stay the same. I need to observe the new stuff that's coming out and add on the things that work. But I also need to not get distracted by shiny things. And this is.

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  I think it's Cal Newport that talks about this again. He says that the best business people in the world are essentially complex, hard to replicate decision engines. That's all that they are. They have tons and tons of intangibles and input data. And they are able to like the old style accounting machines that feed out a piece of paper. And they'll just feed out one number and that number is what you're supposed to do next. And I think that trusting your gut and allowing that to come through gets rid of a lot of the noise. A lot of people that get into online business and creator economies as well were so cerebral. We're so pulled along by the raw horsepower that we have cognitively. That you think, right, I'm just going to think my way out of this problem.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Chris Williamson?

  But especially as time goes on, perhaps thinking your way into a solution at the beginning is a good idea. But as time goes on, you have so much embodied understanding of the stuff that you're doing. You almost, I'm sure that you get this. When you create certain pieces of your work, you'll feel like it's good. You'll, you'll, it'll be sensed somewhere in you. I get that with podcasts. I just know like, dude, that was like a dance or like a, like a football match or a beautiful MMA fight or something like that. It was, it was amazing. Why? Well, I don't know. I don't fucking know. Okay. I just, but I know that it was. And that trusting your gut, especially as the experience continues to go, focusing on simplicity,

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  focusing on the things, the core of the very, very business. And then keeping that perspective, I think that that's such a powerful message.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's worked so far.

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  What is the price that you have to pay to be Jack Butcher?

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  I think anybody obsessed with anything is hard to turn off. I think that's the crazy thing about operating in a leveraged environment as well is you can always be doing a hundred times better, right? It's like you don't come home from work and you're like, day's done, you know? It's like, I could have used a different word in that sentence and the result would have been like, you know, 2X. So I think it's, the price is like, is just constantly critiquing your behavior in, you know, in a healthy way, hopefully. You can definitely get into dicey scenarios where you don't, you know, don't balance your

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  health properly with what you're doing on the business side, but without that, I don't know if, I don't know if the result is as possible. It's a healthy obsession, I hope. What else is that? It's, it's also the like, I'm sure you go back to your first interviews and you're like, you just cringe at some of the stuff you said, like even three months ago and you're like, man, what a donkey. Like I just, I just did that poorly now with the information I have acquired since then. I think, yeah, there's like self-examination and just recognizing that you're basically never going to get it right.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  And if you're, if you're, there's a great quote by Ira Glass, he talks about taste. It's like the reason creative people get into the pursuits they get into is because they have great taste, but as your craft evolves, your taste is always going to outpace your craft. So you're going to look at your stuff and you're like, that sucks, man. But like, if you're improving, that's why, right? It's like, it's this unattainable goal you're always chasing and just to fall in love with the, with the fact that the goalpost is moving as opposed to like scoring, I think that's the, that's the key.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  And everybody deals with it differently or people have different levels of ability to do that. But slowly you get better at recognizing that it's just a sequence of todays and the goalpost is always going to move.

• 1:05:28Chris Williamson?

  There's a story about the Buddha and one of his most famous quotes, which is, "Life is suffering." And the word that they have for suffering is dukkha, but some scholars contest that dukkha doesn't translate to suffering, it translates to unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. And this relates to how we are evolved, that there is built into the substrate of our being, a degree of unsatisfactoriness. Every experience that you have will be tarnished just slightly. We're anticipatory beings. We imagine this amazing thing, and then we get there and there's, we should have had it blended instead of a iced mojito, or there's a little bit of sand between my toes, or I wish that I'd gone for the medium well steak instead of the medium rare steak. Even though it's almost

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  perfect, there's always something because that's how it's built in. And this dukkha bias, as I call it, as soon as you realize that is a feature of life, not a bug, there isn't something wrong with the situation. The situation is always going to have something wrong with it. As soon as you realize that, from a creator's side, which I'd never even thought of before, the podcast that you produce is always going to be a little bit more shit than the podcast that you could have produced.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like, there's answers I've given on this conversation. I'm like, subconscious track, like, you sound like an idiot while I'm giving the answer.

• 1:06:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  But, like, yeah, I'll do another one in a couple of weeks' time, and maybe I'll answer a little differently.

• 1:06:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  There's just a fascinating, yeah, a fascinating thing that I think also has been confirmed through the symptoms of building a network, where you get introduced to people who are just, like, you admire at a ridiculous level.

• 1:07:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  And then they tell you stuff, and you're like, what?

• 1:07:20Chris Williamson?

  You're just human as well.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're just the same. You're just struggling with the same stuff.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Dude, listen to Sam Harris is on Lex Friedman's show, right? Like Lex is crushing it in the podcast space. I think he's fully filled the void that Rogan's left on YouTube and congrats to him. Sam Harris, now that Jordan Peterson's been ticked off the list, like Harris is next on there for me as sort of dream guests. And Lex says precisely what you've just said there. You know, this is a guy who does 12 hours, a 12 hours ish of deep work every single day, self produces his own podcast, terrifying IQ, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And he says exactly the same thing, that he's berating himself during the podcast for a thing that he's saying as he's saying it on the podcast. And he's chastising

• 1:08:05Chris Williamson?

  himself for how stupid and dumb, I've just said this thing to Sam Harris, what a fucking idiot. Like, that's how his inner monologue works. And to concede that no matter how much better you get, no matter how many more capacities you gain, as you said, the yardstick for where you're supposed to get to is always going to be out of reach of where you do, because it is a feature, not a bug, that doke bias.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  There's a, I think it's Oscar's speech, Matthew McConaughey, have you seen that one? He said, who's your hero? He said, me in 10 years, I think he says. And he's like, who's going to be my hero in 10 years? Me in 10 years. Like, that's like just a great model to think, you know, every day is some feedback loop that's gonna put you in a better position tomorrow. That's essentially the game.

• 1:08:56Chris Williamson?

  I think a community is really important for this. And I, I can't think of any examples now, but you could imagine a creator perhaps who didn't necessarily have as much direct audience feedback as you do, and fortunately as I do.

• 1:09:13Chris Williamson?

  This is the important thing and you know, to everyone that's listening, I've taken this on board as a creator, understanding what I really appreciate from people that consume my content. The friction now from me hearing something or seeing something that's good on the internet and congratulating the person that created it has essentially dropped to zero. Someone that I don't know, someone that's got basically no followers, someone that's got a million followers, I'll happily send an email to Lex Friedman's old public or text Michael Malice and say, yo dude, if you speak to Lex, tell them about this. It doesn't fucking matter. But on the off chance that it does reach that person or whatever, someone that you do know that's great, that's just launched a new business, those bits of

• 1:09:54Chris Williamson?

  feedback, that congratulations or that reinforcement about them doing something good is worth 100,000 plays and it's worth 10,000 subscribers. That is a big, big impact on. So if you love what your favorite creators do, my advice is to tell them because if you don't, you risk them running out of gas and no longer producing the thing that you love from them.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Co-signed.

• 1:10:22Chris Williamson?

  Duplicated. What drives you now? You've reached some degrees of financial success that I imagine previously would have perhaps only been a dream to you. What drives you now?

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  Uh, I think getting into a situation where you can pursue your curiosity with a higher degree of conviction is, is like, that's a nice feedback loop to get into. So, um, the project I was talking about before, where we, there's four of us and we made this thing in a couple of hours. Years ago, I wouldn't have, uh, I wouldn't have gotten myself into a situation like that because it's like maniacal focus on the, you know, the engine that is creating the free time to do stuff like that. So.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  It's definitely, there's two sides of it. One is the family time. So how do I build a business and a life that is like equally, equally prioritizes doing things that are going to help people I've never met and spending a bunch of time with family. And then the second part is like,

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  just by continuing to pursue your curiosity, you, I have proof for this now. The opportunities that I never knew existed will show up. So it's just like, that is the inherent drive. The thing that you have to come back and remind yourself is like, I don't even know what it is I want or what situation I want to be in. But if I keep doing this thing that I'm good at, stuff that I never could have possibly imagined is just going to pop up. So, and that, that's, we go back to the this is pointless thing. It's like knowing that back then, I knew it by osmosis because I listened to podcasts and read people's words that have experienced it.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  But that, um, yeah, just, just trusting the fact that that is going to stay true. If you stay true to the process is, uh, is definitely a driving force.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Having faith in your future self like that. Matthew McConaughey said it on his Oscars speech. And I've got a buddy who likes to buy fast cars and spend a lot of money. And whenever he gets asked, dude, you know, you're fairly highly asset sort of leveraged up here. There's a lot of your net worth in depreciating vehicles that have got four wheels. And he says, it doesn't matter. Future Andrew will pay for it. And his self-confidence that whatever the situation is, that he will always get it sorted moving forward. Uh, I mean, his verges on pathological, which is also admirable, but not necessarily scalable or replicable. Yeah, exactly. It's not something that everyone can do immediately.

• 1:13:12Chris Williamson?

  But having faith that the small amount of success or the large amount of success that you've had has been due to something innate in you that isn't there in the market already. And going, okay, well, let's go, you know, let's drill down and see just how long I can ride this until the wheels do come off or how far I can fly this rocket ship until I do run out of boosters. Because I don't know. I mean, do you ever see an end? For the creator economy here, we're talking decades of time here, right?

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100%. I think it's like a huge transformational shift. Like, the people that would have asked me those questions three years ago, like, "Oh, what are you doing? You're an emotional speaker." Now, I run into them, and they'll be like, "How do I build like an online business? Or how do I start to like, put myself out there online in a way that's gonna create opportunity for people?" It feels like there's been a seismic shift. I think COVID last year, that's just, it may have been debatable a year ago, but now it's not, right? It's like, your identity is, at the very least, 50% online and 50% offline. Maybe that wasn't true before, but now it is.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  And I think everybody, creator economy is just such a, I mean, it's such a broad term. And what I think it really means is, is like, you know, people participating in something with skin in the game online, that feels to me like a fairly broad but accurate description of what we're talking about. And, yeah, like, Jim O'Shaughnessy is a great example. Like, that guy that got hired for his podcast was because he's out there putting his work out. And this, like, he didn't do that to get a job on Jim O'Shaughnessy's podcast, right?

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  He just happened to have one because he was doing this online for a period of time. I think the more evidence that builds up in pop culture for things like that happening, the more people will start to pursue it, the more of a positive-sum game this becomes. And, yeah, you could go down a rabbit hole about what the eventual, like, spread of resources looks like as a result of that. And I think all the platforms and things make a lot of those decisions and like how people get rewarded for what they do. But I do not think it's going anywhere. To the extent, I would say, like, universal basic income at some point is a...

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  Inevitability because of like the amount of efficiency that will be achieved on the like on a commercial scale by any commodity business and then like we'll have a huge shift to you know people needing to fill their days with stuff you either create content or you consume content that's going to be a that's going to be the divide.

• 1:16:19Chris Williamson?

  Man, awesome. It's been a long time coming. I'm very glad that I've got you on. People want to check out your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Twitter is the best place to start. So Jack Butcher and Visualize Value on Twitter and then you can find everything else from there.

• 1:16:33Chris Williamson?

  Jack Butcher, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, thank you so much.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  Hey, thanks. It was a pleasure.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the revenant.

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:17:03Speaker 04

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 and middle without parent.